"I don't know why I do not resent this, Lady Ardingly," he said, "or why I do not leave the room; but I do neither."
"Because you are a selfish, or at any rate an ambitious man," she said. "Every one who is worth his salt is. Now I will put names to my advice."
She paused a moment to take some coffee, and waited till the man had left the room.
"Mildred is a very vulgar woman," she said, "and her vulgarity shows itself in the nature of her mistakes. Silly Billy came here the other day, and I asked him about his scene with you. You did not score there, and if he had not been a clever little fellow in a small sort of bird-like manner, you would have involved yourself in a row of monstrous proportions. He managed you in his microscopical way very successfully. That is so. He also told me that it was Mildred who had suggested that absurd canard to him. There is the stupidity of the woman. There was no grain of sense in it all. Nobody who knows, would believe such things about Marie for ten days together. But supposing some gutter-rag of a paper had got hold of it! The wife of the man who was in the running for the Cabinet prosecuting an intrigue with the Liberal candidate of his division of Surrey! How charming! If I had wanted to ruin you, I should have tried to think of something as damaging as that. If I had thought of that I should have been quite content. Did you not see that, my poor fellow?"
"We did not know he was standing at the time," said Jack rather feebly.
"Doubtless. But the secret of success in this world is not to make blunders where one does not know. Any one can avoid blunders if he knows everything. In any case, here is the position. It is sedulously circulated that your wife has an intrigue with Jim Spencer. And who circulates it? This cook! Luckily I did something to stop people talking."
"I told them I happened to know that Mildred had quarrelled with your wife, and had invented this story out of revenge. That is the case, is it not?"
"It certainly happens to be true. But I don't see how you knew."
"I guessed it was so," said Lady Ardingly. "It was the only reasonable supposition. There is not another which holds water. Besides, if it had not been true, what does it matter? Now, this is the first way in which Mildred might have ruined you. The second concerns you also."